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10 Dec 2016 3:28:57pm

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I think you might have slightly misinterpreted the Euthyphro dilemma - essentialy it's about whether things commanded by God are good because they have been commanded by God (that is, the act of them being commanded is the thing that makes them 'good'), in which case morality is effectively arbitrary (God could, in principle, command anything. For a Biblical example, consider Abraham and Isaac - with this particular horn of the dilemma, it was moral for Abraham to sacrifice Isaac when it was first commanded, and then when it was commanded otherwise it was immoral). Alternatively, what is commanded by God is commanded because it is moral - that is, God tells you not to murder/steal/whatever because the right thing to do is not to murder/steal/whatever. In that case, there exists an objective standard of morality that isn't the divine command, as such.

In your case you appear to have taken the second horn and located the objective standard of morality as the nature of God, which is, I suppose, one way of getting around the dilemma, assuming God is immutable (which is part of the usual definition). Of course, then you're just left with the problem of figuring out what the nature of a fundamentally ineffable being is. :P

Fundamentally, as far as I see it, Christianity (and really all religions) are based principally on a faith position. Kids being taught Christianity are taught the Christian position, not why they should accept the Christian position. It's kind of taken as given. That's why I'd say they're not evidence-based - the most important questions in the entire philosophical edifice either don't get asked or get almost dismissively trivial answers.

I do concede that my position isn't a complete and perfect description of morality. As I mentioned earlier, ethics is a really hard problem. Relativity can maybe sneak in in the definition of the utility function, although it's kind of supposed to be derivable from what-works-for-societies, which is probably only a scientific question in principle rather than practice (I can't see the ethics committee authorising that particular experiment).

It does rely somewhat heavily on the idea of enlightened self-interest, which is somewhat of a weakness. Personally I'd like to think that sufficiently enlightened self-interest never results in actions that people would be unhappy with, but that's not exactly easy to demonstrate.

I'm aware of a number of the criticisms of utilitarian-style ethical systems on the basis of recommending events that are pretty clearly monstrous - for example, the classic example of being a doctor at a hospital where you have five patients that need a transplant of a different organ today, or they'll die. Then a perfectly healthy person walks into the hospital. Do you kill them take their organs, or not?

I think such problems can be handled by the same kind of logic that seperates the Prisoner's Dilemma and the Itera